Alternative outcome

by Peter Rowlands

  Perhaps the clincher was that Vantage might be about to confirm new funding tomorrow, which would mean Ashton could pay back Janni Noble the next day, and my news story would have run out of steam before it even started.

  I sat back abruptly. Why was I letting my imagination run away with me like this? Surely a bribe was a bribe? No amount of rationalising would change it into something else. If everything was as above board as Ashton wanted me to believe, would he have taken such trouble to tempt me to drop my story?

  I wanted to talk this through with someone, and I realised with a jolt that the first person to come into my mind was Ashley. I reprimanded myself sharply. I was hypothesising a familiarity between us that simply didn’t exist. Perhaps with a large dose of luck it eventually might, but at present I shouldn’t even be thinking of burdening her with my life choices.

  By way of evasion I logged on to my digital publisher’s web site, and spent long minutes trawling through their terms and conditions. I wanted to know whether I was legally entitled to withdraw my book from sale and have it published in print by another company.

  After half an hour I was little the wiser; the answer seemed to be maybe yes, maybe no. Well, if these Hunt Topham people knew that my book was already online, and were willing to talk to me in spite of that, they must have experience of dealing with this situation.

  The morning continued to tick away.

  Chapter 35

  But not for long. At eleven forty-five I picked up my mobile and tapped in the number Rick Ashton had given me. I’d decided I simply had to take this opportunity to the next level, and at least find out where I stood. The train was leaving the metaphorical station, and if I didn’t jump on board I would never even get to the first stop.

  It was a mobile number, and it was answered immediately. “Annette Braddock.” Clipped, businesslike: a woman in her forties or early fifties, perhaps.

  “My name is Mike Stanhope. Rick Ashton of Vantage Express suggested I give you a call.”

  There was a tiny moment while she worked out who I was. “Mike, yes. Your book. We thought it might fit into our newcomers’ portfolio.”

  “That’s very exciting.”

  I had the impression of her rummaging, perhaps in a notebook, perhaps just in her head. In the background I could hear an airport announcement. “We might need you to take another look at some aspects – work with our editorial team. Standard stuff.”

  Slowly I said, “But in principle you’re saying you would be interested in publishing it.?”

  “Well, to be fair I only had a chance to skip through it. It has some good things going for it, but it’s rough at the edges, and you don’t have a head of steam behind you, which is a drawback. No significant social media presence, nothing like that. So let’s see what my team comes up with before we get ahead of ourselves.”

  I sat back, running my free hand through my hair. “I realise this probably isn’t a good time to talk, but could I just ask you a question?”

  “Fire away.”

  “I feel I should be honest. I’m just thinking, why this book? You must see thousands like it. Why do I deserve a fast track?”

  She gave a short laugh. “You don’t sound exactly over-keen to sell yourself to me.”

  Quickly I said, “I assure you there’s nothing I’d like more than to get into print. I’m just trying to understand what’s happening here.”

  I could hear her thinking again. “OK, you seem like a straight guy, Mike. I didn’t know what to expect from my conversation with Richard.”

  “Well thank you for that.”

  Clearly measuring her words, she said, “There are hundreds of plausible books out there. Potential sellers, I mean. Thousands. The fact is that indifferent books sometimes get published, and good ones sometimes don’t. It’s not just about merit, it’s also about the entire package. About marketability.” She put the word in slightly ironic verbal quotes. “At the end of the day, sometimes it’s just about being in the right place at the right time.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “I suppose you don’t have an agent?”

  “Correct.”

  “OK, we might need to look at that.” She paused a moment. “I tell you what, Mike. Call my team leader Zoe. She’ll talk this through with you, and discuss what might need to be done. I’m out of action for a couple of weeks, but I’ll keep a watching brief.”

  She gave me a phone number and hung up.

  * * *

  I needed a second opinion on all this, and I knew where I’d get a blast of common sense. I called Joanna.

  She was all for it. I knew she would be. “What does it matter if this man Ashton has his own agenda? He’s not the publisher. If you get a book deal, it’ll be on your own merit.”

  “Hopefully, but that’s still a big if. And whether I get it or not, well, my integrity as a journalist is shot.”

  “Only in your own mind, Mike. After all, nobody knows about this news story except you and me and Mr Ashton.”

  “And the man who fed it to me.”

  “He sounds big enough to stand on his own two feet. You don’t owe him any favours.”

  I could always count on Joanna to make me feel better, but her words also set me thinking. Getting a book deal was far from a foregone conclusion, but having reached this point, I’d been assuming the outcome would depend ultimately on the book itself. But what if Ashton had the power of veto further down the track? Clearly he’d had no problem getting hold of Annette Braddock and floating the idea of taking up my book in the first place. Maybe he would be just as capable of intervening later and stopping it dead. Did I want to be in his thrall indefinitely?

  * * *

  Zoe, Annette Braddock’s team leader, seemed to know all about me when I called her, and she already had a plan, which included meeting her in the flesh at their offices in Hertford. I wondered briefly if this was in order to gauge my marketability at first hand. Her explanation was that this would “get some personal synergy going.”

  I said, “Annette seemed to think you might want some rewriting done.”

  “That’s pretty standard. Authors get too close to their own work. They can’t see the wood for the trees. You get scenes meandering off into blind alleys, factual inaccuracies, continuity glitches, pointless purple prose, that kind of thing. Someone usually has to knock things into shape and get rid of the redundant bits.”

  “So who actually does this rewriting?”

  “Oh, you do it, to start with. You.” She seemed to think this needed stressing. “First of all we discuss it with you in outline, then you have another crack at it.”

  “God, it sounds a bit like having your homework rejected.”

  She laughed. “It’s not always that bad. And once everyone’s happy with it, we put our own edit team on to it to get rid of any rough edges.”

  “I thought I’d already done that.”

  She let that one ride.

  “You do realise it’s already been online …?”

  “Think of this as a second edition. A better one.”

  Chapter 36

  I stared at my inbox, seeing emails about articles I had to write, press releases I didn’t want to read, spam that I hadn’t managed to intercept. It all looked so mundane, so endlessly tedious. How much more beguiling to be working with a real live book publisher on my first novel. Fleetingly I imagined book signings, foreign tours, receptions.

  I stood up abruptly. Where was all this coming from? Did I seriously see myself as Booker Prize material? Hardly. I shoved my chair irritably towards the desk, which it struck harder than I expected. Coffee sloshed over the edge of my mug, sketching an arc of brown drips on some notes I’d been scribbling next to it.

  Out loud I muttered, “You disappoint me, Mr Stanhope. Your integrity deficit is a disgrace to your profession, and your ambition outstrips your ability by a massive margin.”

  I sat back down, frowning. It wasn’t going to happen, was it? Now or eve
r. Even published authors were lucky to reach celebrity status. Most had to keep their day job going for years after signing a book deal – perhaps for the rest of their lives. And I wasn’t even past the first post.

  Ah, but that day job – how long could I keep it up? There was the rub. I’d stumbled into business journalism, more or less; it had never been my goal. After university I’d worked as a dogsbody at a large magazine publishing company, and gradually I’d found myself given minor editorial jobs. When my boss realised I was reasonably literate, those jobs had become more frequent and more demanding, and when I proved I was up to them I’d been invited to join the editorial team permanently. I was the living proof that courses and qualifications weren’t always a prerequisite for a journalistic career.

  But I’d never actually set out on this path – it had just unfolded in front of me. Not only that, but for many years I’d felt a compulsion to justify my place on it. I felt a need to question everything I wrote about, to produce investigative articles even when there was nothing to investigate.

  This continued even when I found myself steered into the relatively uncontroversial world of logistics and transport, which somehow became my speciality. People started to regard me as the go-to man for probing pieces, and oddly, the more of these articles I wrote, the angrier I became: angry with the world I was writing about, yet at the same time angry with myself for having to write about it.

  But finally my anger ran out: a development that coincided pretty much with Sandy’s announcement that she’d run out of patience with me. Since then I’d felt rudderless and incapable of doing much more than go through the motions.

  * * *

  But that was then and this was now. Lately two things seemed to be nudging my life in a new and more positive direction – my quest to track down the Markham family, and now Ashley Renwick.

  I wasn’t sure where my involvement with Ashley was heading. She was engaged – I couldn’t ignore that fact; yet it seemed clear that she was as drawn to me as I was to her. All I could hope was that somehow this might shake out to a favourable outcome.

  As for the Markhams, I felt ambivalent about my search. Yes, it would be intriguing to find out why they had disappeared – but not if it would be detrimental to them.

  Abruptly my mind jumped back to the time when we’d all been on holiday at the Fairmile. It was a warm day at the end of our first week. I’d wandered round the corner of a building, my thoughts entirely elsewhere, and more or less bumped straight into Trina. To this day I still had an intense memory of the sunshine on the grey stone wall, and our exclamations of shock.

  She said sorry and I said sorry, and I think she said something like “I’m always wandering around with my head in the clouds.” I probably stammered, “No, I ought to look where I’m going.” I was no doubt reeling at being peremptorily flung into such close quarters with her. We were actually having a conversation.

  Without that unintended encounter, we would never have gone on to share a ball game on one of the lawns, or to sit afterwards at a metal table drinking lemonade provided by her mother. That sun-splashed memory had lived with me for years, and I’d sought vainly to re-create it with other girls in other environments. Somehow nothing had ever matched up, and the more I’d tried to make it happen, the more elusive it had become.

  There was a bittersweet quality to the memory, though. When I’d eventually stood up to return to my parents, she’d pulled out a scrap of paper and a pencil from a small purse. “Give me your address. I’ll write to you when we all get home.”

  I’d been surprised and flattered by this unexpectedly forthright gesture, but too nonplussed to ask for her own address in exchange. So it was a one-way street; and the letter had never come.

  She’d left the following day, along with her family, and I’d never seen any of them again. It now seemed clear to me that my search for her family was inextricably bound up with that yearning for the unattainable.

  * * *

  My computer pinged, announcing the arrival of an incoming email. Without much interest I glanced at the inbox, but then I quickly sat up. It was a one-line message.

  “My name is Trina Markham. I understand you are looking for me.”

  PART 2

  Chapter 37

  Could it really be this easy? After all these months of searching, had Trina Markham really reached out to me of her own accord?

  I examined the email more closely. It was from someone called tpowell9775, and had been sent from a free mass-market email address. Well, that was fair enough – Trina could have married someone called Powell.

  How should I reply? I had to think carefully. Assuming this was the real Trina, I needed to say something friendly and reassuring to her. After all, at the end of the day I had no valid reason to be looking for her or her family in the first place, other than sheer curiosity. In my own mind I might have elevated the whole exercise into a piece of legitimate journalistic research, but she wasn’t to know that. So I had to sound plausible and undemanding.

  But was this in fact the real Trina? I’d spent years asking questions that people didn’t quite want to answer, and I’d got used to evasion. It had made me sceptical. So in case this wasn’t her, I had to avoid revealing too much that an impostor wouldn’t know.

  Finally I opened an email window and started writing.

  Thanks so much for getting in touch.

  You’re quite right, I’ve been trying to track you down. I hope you don’t mind. It was just a whim really. I had such a great time all those years ago at the Fairmile Hotel in Falmouth. I was trying to catch up with the people I met there, and I remember you very clearly, though you might not remember me so well. I was the shy bloke who used to wander around looking lost.

  After all these years, I just thought it would be nice to get back in touch. If you felt like it you could let me know a bit about your life since then, and I could do the same with mine. We might have other friends in common. It’s one of those things one could never do without the internet, so I’m just taking advantage of that.

  I spent two summer holidays at the Fairmile with my parents, Tony and Janet Stanhope. I think we coincided with your family in my first year, which was probably 1989 or 1990. Sadly my parents have since died, but I went back to look at the place earlier this year. It has changed somewhat!

  I don’t want to intrude into your life if you’d rather I didn’t, so please don’t feel under any pressure. If you’d prefer not to take this any further, that’s absolutely no problem – just say so, or don’t even bother to reply to this. I’d hate you think I’m an internet stalker or something, which I assure you I’m not!

  Thank you again for taking the trouble to write. Do let me know what you think, and I’ll respond accordingly.

  Throwing in the bit about internet stalking made me feel slightly uneasy, but it was an objection I felt I should meet head on. However, once I’d written it, I realised it was unsettlingly close to the truth. I was stalking Trina in a way, though I’d never thought of it like that until now. There was a fine line between reconnecting with old friends and hassling people who didn’t want to be hassled, whatever high-minded journalistic imperative you used in order to justify it. Under the circumstances, you could argue that my pursuit of these people had crossed that line long ago.

  Then again, she was the one who had contacted me, so she must at least be willing to enter into some kind of dialogue with me. No one had forced her to get in touch.

  If, indeed, it was her.

  My mouse hovered over the send button for what seemed like minutes, then I clicked it.

  Gone. Sent.

  * * *

  Joanna was over the moon about the email.

  “It must be her! Who else would bother to contact you like that?”

  John was more wary. “You never know what’s going to come at you out of the internet. Look at the endless stream of spam we all get.”

  We were walking along the street from
their house, heading for an Indian restaurant. As usual these days I was glancing warily around for possible abductors, but saw no evidence of anything out of the ordinary. Hopefully there was strength in numbers.

  I said, “John’s right. Look at the hoax calls that the police always get when they put out appeals for missing people. This could be the equivalent of that.”

  Joanna said, “Well I think you’re both being negative old miseries!”

  After we’d arrived at the restaurant Joanna started again on the same tack. “So you haven’t heard from her again since you sent your reply?”

  “No, but it’s only been a couple of days. I think I should give her a bit more time to decide what she wants to say.”

  She seemed ready to keep on picking over this, so I decided to move the conversation on. Turning to John, I said, “Did Jo tell you I might have an opportunity to get my book published in print?”

  “I think she said something about it.” He glanced quickly at Joanna, who nodded enthusiastically. “Sounds brilliant. You must be very pleased.”

  “Well, it’s only a possibility at the moment. Someone I know is trying to pull a few strings for me, but I don’t know if it’s going to work out yet.”

  He could obviously hear the hesitation in my voice, and said, “I wouldn’t worry about string-pulling. That’s what keeps the world ticking over.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So how did this come about?”

  “Well, someone I know through work has business connections with a publishing house, and thought he might be able to get them to take an interest.”

  “And have they?”